The High Price of Failing to Transition to Clean Energy

Next year, the electricity bills for twenty percent of Americans will start reflecting the high cost of failing to transition to clean energy. 

On July 30, PJM, the regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in Pennsylvania and all or parts of 12 other states and the District of Columbia, announced the results of its latest capacity auction to procure generation resources to ensure a reliable electricity grid.

The cost of lining up those resources has skyrocketed—by a factor of almost seven—to a record high level. Electricity bills for the 65 million people in the region could increase by as much as 29% starting in June 2025—and it may be only the beginning unless swift action is taken by PJM.

PJM says the higher prices are driven by three factors:

• Generator retirements—mainly due to natural gas plants outcompeting coal fired power plants—have decreased available supply.
• Increasing peak load (overall growth in electricity demand, as I pointed out here, may be overestimated).
• The implementation of FERC-approved market reforms that better reflect reliability risks posed by extreme weather.

There is a fourth, unstated reason behind the price spike which, as the Natural Resources Defense Council has said, was foreseeable and preventable—the lack of a clean energy transition in PJM.

The auction resulted in this generation mix for the June 2025-May 2026 delivery year:

• 48% gas
• 21% nuclear
• 18% coal
• 5% demand response
• 4% hydro
• 2% other resources
• 1% solar
• 1% wind

PJM is severely overreliant on fossil fuels—especially natural gas-fired generation. Indeed, the unreliability of natural gas plants during extreme weather events, as weighed by PJM’s new FERC-approved reliability risk model, appears to be a major contributing factor to the cost increase. The energy mix saddling PJM customers and their wallets reflects a failure to adequately plan and act to diversify the resource mix to ensure an affordable and reliable power grid.

Massive amounts of clean energy generation and storage projects are backlogged in PJM. Renewables and storage comprise over 97% of proposed new generation projects in the PJM queue. But as reported here, a 2023 report from Americans for a Clean Energy Grid awarded PJM a grade of “D+” for its process of building new transmission lines necessary to connect new generation sources to the grid.

Further, in 2022, PJM paused its interconnection process and stopped approving new generation projects for almost two years while it developed a proposal for FERC-ordered reforms to ease entry of new generation resources. FERC rejected PJM’s initial proposal last year and finally approved a revised one in July.

PJM now says that they expect to process about 72,000 MW of new generation resources from the queue in 2024 and 2025; however, about 38,000 MW that have cleared the queue have not been built due to challenges beyond PJM’s control, including financing, supply chain, siting, and permitting issues.

PJM has analyzed the impacts of a clean energy transition, and in a report released in July, found that a grid powered by as much as 93 percent carbon-free electricity could still be reliable, and that this is achievable as soon as 2035.

PJM needs to urgently implement that vision of a decarbonized grid to ensure reliability and protect consumers—and the planet. It must go all out to enable and rapidly scale up clean energy generation as well as more flexible demand-side resources. It should also facilitate demand side innovations like this very promising UK startup that’s looking to gain a U.S. foothold.

Policymakers in PJM states must demand those actions from PJM. They must also get to work with their Federal counterparts on the urgent grid governance reforms—at both Federal and regional levels—identified in this essential Kleinman Center whitepaper.

There’s no time to lose. The next auction is in December.

John Quigley

Senior Fellow, Kleinman Center

John Quigley is a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center and previously served on the Center’s Advisory Board. He served as Secretary of the PA Department of Environmental Protection and of the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.